My dad loved the ocean. He’d always liked being near water, and for him, in the end, the Thames didn’t really cut it. Joe and I had put most of our money into Joe’s burrito business, Joerritos, so when they offered us a holiday in the spare room in their cottage, we said yes, despite Joe’s reservations. It was a mistake in the short term, and in the long term it wasn’t. We were all cooped up together, staring through the windows at leaden skies. The sea was dark with changing bands of grey; I yearned for sun and golden beach visions. And from the beginning of the week Dad was strange, veering between conversational and despondent. I felt almost physically ill at the thought that the cancer might have returned. ‘Is he OK?’ I asked Claire the first morning after we’d arrived, when he was out at the market with Joe, fetching bread.
Claire, small in the darkness of her Breton kitchen, drew her bifocals away from her head and rubbed her eyes. ‘Matt is fine – if you mean with the cancer. But I think he is worried about you,’ she said.
‘Worried about me? Why?’
‘You will have to ask him.’ Claire sighed. ‘I think also he is a bit depressed.’ She closed her eyes. ‘It happens to old men.’
‘We came all this way!’ I said, as if we’d used a caravan of camels over six months to find them in a desert, rather than two drives with a P&O ferry in the middle of it.
‘I know,’ Claire replied equably. ‘Just talk with him, Rose. I think he would like you to try.’
Dad got lucky with Claire. As for Claire, I don’t know if she feels lucky, particularly, but I’m glad for her existence. They met in their mid-fifties, at a friend of a friend’s summer party, and got married when I was twenty-six. Of course it does not escape me that my father has ended up with a Frenchwoman, given my own mother’s surname, but I don’t say anything about that to him. Claire is far from an evil step-mother. Claire understands my dad and she loves him, plain to see, but always with her terms intact. I think this is because Claire has been married before. She’s made mistakes and learned, and I expect she chose a different type of man the next time round. She wields self-assurance over Dad – demonstrated by her composure, her long-sightedness about their future – but she does it cleanly, and kindly. I admire that. Dad needs that. I have come to realize he needs to know where he is.
I often wondered what he’d told Claire about his past, about how he was a man before he was my father. She never asked me anything, that’s for sure. In their spare room there’s a framed photo of Dad and me on the dresser. I must have been about two, a little top-knot on my head, done up with a technicolour bow. Slightly scuffing my foot, I’m holding his hand as we stand in what looks like a petting zoo. He was muscular, then. Dark-haired, legs far apart in a combative stance. Of course I’d wondered who’d taken the picture. I must have asked, until I knew not to. No one had taken it. We’d taken it ourselves.
*
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ I said to my dad that afternoon.
He did his customary head dip, looking through the low front window of the cottage, towards the water. ‘The beach?’ he said, as if there was anywhere else we could go.
We went down to the pebbled shore below the house, side-stepping crab carcasses, reaching down for a razor shell or a faded oyster, the debris of marine life that could not survive once out of water. The gulls wheeled above our heads, mewling. I thought: Claire’s got it wrong. This is the conversation where he tells me it’s come back, terminal.
‘Do you start back straightaway?’ he said, lowering himself to the pebbles.
‘Yeah. Soon as we’re home.’
My dad stared out at the unending line of the Atlantic Ocean. I looked at his profile, the slim angles of his face, the large nose, the cheekbones sharp as the edge of a cuttlefish, the scruffy grey hair. He was sixty-four, and I was thirty-four. It had always been just us. I knew that he hated how I worked in a coffee shop, even though it was a nice, popular one, called Clean Bean. How many times had I heard the phrase ‘first-rate brain’ when he talked about me. I suppose I did have a good brain in many ways, and I should be doing more, even though I could never say what ‘more’ was. Even my best friend, Kelly, had started to say something about this, hinting that I’d outgrown Clean Bean. You can do anything, Rosie! You’re so bloody clever. Just believe you can do it. Please.
Dad couldn’t seem to understand how things had gone, even though he’d been my longest, closest witness. I’d given up defending myself, but I still defended Joe. We were going to make Joerritos a success. We didn’t talk about Joerritos to Dad. It was something of a touchpaper.
‘Rosie,’ he said. ‘I could – give you some money, you know. Not much, but some. Isn’t there a course, or something you’d like to do? A language? Or a skill?’
‘Dad.’
He put his hands up. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He paused. ‘And you already have a degree.’
‘Yes, I have a degree,’ I said. We’d been having this conversation on and off for a decade. Ten years can go fast when you’re not looking. After graduating in my early twenties with an English degree, I’d worked in a mainly secretarial capacity at quite decent, interesting companies. But I never pushed myself. I was essentially an enabler, a facilitator, an administrator of other people’s plans and ambitions. When Joe had suggested the burrito venture two years ago, I decided to resign from my job and join him in planning our own business. I figured: I’m a good cook. And I was scared of being a subordinate for the rest of my working life.
‘Are you happy?’ my dad said suddenly.
I looked at him in alarm. No, was the word I wanted to say. And hearing that word in my head, I felt that it was not the answer a woman of my age and good health should be giving. In the beat of my blood, in the swallow of a glass of water, in the glance of a stranger, I could see happiness. I have known happiness – but I feel as if I can taste other people’s happiness much more strongly than I can my own. I couldn’t have told you what makes me happy, yet I was tired of constantly trying to improve myself. To find, amongst my many shitty selves, my best self. Joe would just roll out of bed and be Joe, but I could not escape my failing self or the potential selves inside me. The Internet told me, daily, that there were many routes to happiness: good yoga leggings, a scented candle. A plant we call the succulent. But the Internet also loosed a second message, a subliminal arrow that still breaks the flesh: by thirty-five, you ought to have it sorted.
I felt a slight collapse. ‘I’ve been a bit stressed, I guess.’
‘I talked to Joe at the market,’ Dad went on. ‘He told me you two were thinking about starting a family.’
I turned to him in disbelief. ‘Joe said that to you?’
‘Just in passing. Just in terms of the long term.’
‘Right.’
‘Which I guess is normal, for a woman of your age, to be thinking about.’
‘Yep,’ I said tightly.
‘It might be the making of you,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘It might be—’
‘I heard you the first time.’
My father looked pained. ‘It’s coming out wrong. I’m just saying, Rosie. A baby is no bad thing.’